The New Data Tool That Gives Meeting Planners a Shortcut to Sourcing Destinations

Meeting planners, hotel executives, and 44 convention bureaus in the U.S. can now see data on how they all engage with each other during the destination-sourcing phase for meetings and conventions.

Launched this week, the new Group Business Trends by Cvent microsite is a free, interactive online tool that pulls together data culled from over $30 billion worth of meetings business sourced through the Cvent event management platform since 2012.

The available data includes: average hotel group rates for different hotel price tiers; group sales behavior; planner breakdowns by geographic location; and volume of requests for proposal (RFPs) for different types of meetings and events in different geographic locations.

"We developed this because there's really a gap right now in the industry for group business-specific data," explained Josh Davis, team lead for product strategy development at Cvent. "Nobody has the level of data that we get to see, based for example on $9.8 billion of group business sourced through our supplier network in 2015 alone."

Group Business Data

One of the platform's most interesting data categories is Group Average Daily Rate (ADR) where you can see how cities have performed very differently over the last four years.

Using San Francisco as a sample case study, we filtered the search mechanism for hotels in the top three price tiers — Upper, Upper Upscale, and Luxury — for the time frame ranging from Q1 2014 to Q1 2016. Then we selected filters to only include data relative to business meetings, conferences, and incentive travel programs at properties under 1,000 rooms.

The results showed that ADR specific to those criteria jumped from $250.1 per room night in Q1 2014 to $314.6 in Q1 2016, with a high of $318 in Q4 2015. Those figures are for proposed rates submitted through Cvent, so they don't reflect actual contracted rates which may vary slightly.

Other destinations like Las Vegas and New York saw a much more minimal rate shift compared to San Francisco, but with significantly higher degrees of fluctuation based on seasonal pricing.

Las Vegas ADR rose from $183.5 to $189.8 during the same 2-year span, while New York declined from $305.2 down to $290.6.

Destination and hotel professionals can also see where their highest volume of RFPs are coming from to help them strategize sales and marketing efforts by targeting planners by geography.

For example, hotels in California who receive incentive travel program RFPs get most of their opportunities, in order of highest volume, from: California, New York, Minnesota, Illinois, and Arizona.

Likewise, planners from California sending out RFPs for incentive travel events submit the most requests to: Las Vegas, Hawaii, Miami, Phoenix, and Los Angeles.

Davis said that the platform is still in beta, and it will be adding more cities across North America within the coming months.